The Monkeys Are All Over the LG Refrigerator

If the new deluxe LG fridge was not designed by monkeys, then it was surely designed by folks who never had to actually live with it and use it. The problem is design, not reliability.

There are a number of areas where poor design is evident, starting with the lighting on the touch panel. There is no problem during the day, but at night there should be a photocell-controlled nightlight. There isn't. Other companies have utilized lighting for years, but not LG. Does the sun never set in Japan?

You can turn on the nightlight manually. That is, if you can find the switch in the dark. Good luck. Yet even with the nightlight on in a dark room, it's still impossible to read the button nomenclature. Why not just leave the nightlight on permanently? It's LED, so it should use minimal power.

There is another design faux pas. My fridge is a “French-door” model, so the icemaker is necessarily in the refrigerator, not freezer, door. The tiny amount of additional heat from the extra illumination when you turn on the light causes the ice in the bin to melt just enough to jam. If you leave the light on overnight, your first job in the morning will be to empty a block of stuck-together ice from the bin.

Looking further down, there are two freezer drawers. The two-drawer model costs extra, so it must be better than the one-drawer model, right? Not so fast. This is actually a capacity-decreasing option. Rather than using the same mechanism between the drawers that they use to seal the area between the refrigerator doors, the horizontal “joint” between the freezer drawers is done the old-fashioned way, by adding a horizontal bar. This bar effectively casts a shadow across the freezer space. That means that nothing stacked above that line can ride back into the freezer when the drawers slide closed.

In each of these design snafus, just a bit more thought could have resulted in a better design. Mine is a deluxe model with far-from-deluxe design.

This entry was submitted by Peter M. Blackford and edited by Rob Spiegel

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You beat me to this post... I don't know how many people remember Goldstar products, but they were always the absolute bottom of the pile...

LG is a South Korean company that was reborn at about the same time as Samsung... They both started out making very cheap products that were basically all crap. They figured out in the mid 90's that they could make better quality products and end up making more money... The problem was, they had a well deserved reputation of making shoddy products.

LG has spent a lot of money on their "Life's Good" campaign, so much so that probably 9 out of 10 people in the US have no idea that the company is really named "Lucky Goldstar"

On the one hand, it's disheartening to see that our places have been reversed; it is now the American products that are generally regarded as inferior... (If they still exist, anyway. There are no American companies actually manufacturing consumer TV's, stereo's, camera's, small kitchen appliances, etc.) There are a few very high end manufacturers of expensive kitchen appliances, but the stuff that average Americans buy is quickly turning out to be made elsewhere... Which is insane... The labor rate in Korea is very nearly as high as it is in America for factory workers, and then they have to ship their products to the opposite side of the planet...

On the other hand, if American companies start to build high quality products, they can have a resurgence. I sure hope Whirlpool figures that out before they go out of business... (Maytag Neptune washer and dryer? Made by Samsung...)

We have a Miele dishwasher that is now 14 years old... Still works as well as the day we bought it, and it has never broke down...

We remodeled out kitchen, and my wife wanted to dump all the white and put in stainless steel... (Black granite; the white stuff looked bad) The Miele just got a new faceplate and control panel. It was a couple hundred bucks, but there was no way I wanted to dump that dishwasher... It's awesome, so quiet we can't hear it when we watch TV in the family room right next to the kitchen...

When I installed it, I took out the GE Profile dishwasher that had broken down several times... Leaked all over the floor once when the pump crapped out, replaced control panel because the plastic touch buttons cracked and shorted out. The dish racks were bent up, cracked and rusting. Cheap P.O.S. I carried that GE out by myself and even opened the slider holding it with one hand... It weighed maybe 70 pounds. (Probably less... I'm 6'4" but I'm no gym rat...)

The Miele on the other hand is a freaking tank. I had to get my older son to help me get it in the house, it was way too heavy to lift...

I don't remember what that GE said exactly, but it had some slogan about how super quiet it was supposed to be on the front of it... We always used the timer to have it go off after we went upstairs to bed, because it was way too loud to have it run while we were watching TV...

LG had produced very good appliances in the previous years, say from 1995 to 2010... but lately...

I've seen some examples that show they are following the foolish practices of their american competitors. I've bought an LG microwave oven which design was certainly, undoubtely, surely made by monkeys of the worst class!

It does NOT produce the power that is specified in the box or the tag on the back side, requiring a full 60 to 70 seconds to heat a medium size cup of coffe... but the design of the exterior is where this monkey team excelled: the door is finished in a totally reflective, mirrorlike finish that makes IMPOSSIBLE to be able to see anything inside the oven during operation. Even trying to see it in a dark room is an exercise in futility, due to the very dim lightbulb inside being totally wrongly placed (most of it's very dim light is thrown up, away from the rotating plate) and the "stylish" door mirror finish! Frequently, when trying to cook some food, it happens that the extremely slow, undepowered oven makes people think it needs more and more time, but then one looses concentration and the result is overheated food, splattered all inside the oven, due to one being totally impeded to see how the cooking is progressing. Maybe this oven is better to be used as a vanity mirror than to cook! amclaussen.

P.D.: I've tested two other units of the same model, all them produce less Microwave power than indicated, so it has to be a design flaw.

Attempts to get he manufacturer attention are all wasted efforts, but if you keep informing all of your friends, coworkers, relatives, strangers walking in the store in the appliances area, in a word: everybody; at least one can inflict some damage to that arrogant company that sold us that awful design!

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